Summary
Mayfair Witches Season 2 finally gets going a bit in Episode 5, with a useful dramatic gimmick moving things along.
I’ve been a vocal critic of Mayfair Witches Season 2 and, to be fair, I still think it’s a bit rubbish. But Episode 5, “The Thrall”, was okay! Thanks to a nifty dramatic concept and the fact it seems to be going somewhere meaningful, even if that “somewhere” turns out to be Scotland, of all places, Rowan’s long-awaited meeting with Julien did, as predicted, yield some results.
I think this episode works a bit better because it’s relatively contained and revolves mostly around a single, quite nifty gimmick. And like the only other decent episode of this season, it also involves Julien heavily. There seems to be a pattern emerging.
Either way, here’s the general idea. After being transported to Julien’s world inside the victrola at the tail end of the previous installment, Rowan sees him as a vulnerable, confused old man, dozing in front of the fire “like a house cat” and making little sense. Fearing he’s useless, she asks Moira to pull her out, but when she emerges in the mortal realm, Julien springs his trap.
As it turns out you have to ask Julien permission to leave. Without him having granted it, Rowan has inadvertently divided herself into two, with her emotional side re-emerging but her raw intellectual half being left behind. It’s very much a literalizing of the old “head versus heart” debate, with the complication being that the half of Rowan that returns has no idea what has happened. She just thinks she feels a bit peaky from all the world-hopping.
Julien can survey the Mayfair house from his world in the form of a tiny dollhouse, so he and Rowan’s intellect have to watch how she’s getting on from a remove, with the fact that the separation will kill her before long giving an effective ticking-clock element to the proceedings. When Lark turns up to confront Rowan about her dodgy DNA, I’d argue that this gimmick is used to surprisingly decent effect, because Rowan gets to see in real-time how she feels about Lark on a purely emotional level, divorced from her responsibilities to the Mayfair clan.
While Emotional Rowan takes a surprisingly honest approach with Lark, telling him all about her true nature as a witch and how her powers relate to Lasher – he accepts this basically immediately, which is dramatically useful but logically a little suspect – Moira dives into Cortland’s repressed memories after figuring out that Julien’s private afterlife is a Scottish pub. Cortland can’t recall his father ever taking him to Scotland, but the memory is in there and must be relevant, so it needs to be pulled to the surface.
Meanwhile, in the afterlife, Logical Rowan learns a little bit more about Mayfair history through Julien, particularly her great-grandmother Marguerite, of whom Julien was particularly fond and from whose journal the scrap of paper reading “Taltos” that Sip discovered in Albrecht’s office came. I’m not entirely clear on what Taltos means, but it’s connected to the Scottish pagan gods, which is important since Moira unearths something crucial from Cortland’s mind – that his trip to Scotland as a child was to visit his brother, Ian, who he remembers as a blood-sacrificing psycho. Julien’s family loyalty is to this crazy Scottish heritage, so it makes sense why he was so instrumental in corrupting Cortland to eventually bring about Lasher’s rebirth through Rowan. It was imperative he got Lasher to Scotland.
The ending of Mayfair Witches Season 2, Episode 5 reveals that’s where Albrecht has taken Lasher – to Donnelaith, Kilbride, where Logical Rowan figures out the Mayfair family distillery is, allowing her to be reunited with Emotional Rowan and returned to the mortal plane. Now with a clear idea of where to go and what to do, everyone, including Lark, is heading to confront Ian, who seems like the only remaining Big Bad now that he has slashed Albrecht’s throat to keep Lasher for himself. Whatever he has planned, it’ll involve old gods and a ceremony and likely a sacrifice, none of which sounds good.
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